The new civic geography of life sciences governance: transitions and trajectories in Australia and New Zealand

This special issue explores life sciences governance at a moment when the ground rules connecting citizens to the state are in transition (Jasanoff 2004), when experiments with science–society dialogue are available for critical analysis (Irwin 2006), and when new forms of “biological citizenship” are emerging (Rose and Novas 2005, Rose 2007, pp. 40–47). In looking at the “new civic geography” of the life sciences and the challenges of democratization, contributors to Life Sciences Governance: Civic Transitions and Trajectories interrogate attempts to engage citizens through both top-down and bottom-up initiatives to debate and dialogue, and contribute to decision-making, about the development and use of new biotechnologies. Some contributors look critically at opportunities to access information about the risks and benefits of life science innovation through the mass media, and reflect on new trajectories in relationships between citizens, experts, and scientists. Others look at struggles over the legitimacy of the regimes used by regulatory agencies to assess risk and/or the role of cultural principles in the regulation of the life sciences.

Questions informing this issue of New Genetics and Society include: What changing or new practices of life sciences governance are emergent and how effective are they? Are standard forms of political and expert authority or established technological “scripts” being disrupted or remade? Do current initiatives to engage citizens merely offer new ways of legitimating the power of “bioelites”,1 or, instead, suggest genuine directions towards more democratic life sciences governance? What new trajectories of deliberative governance might contribute to enhanced civic involvement in policy steering and result in better technological, social, and environmental outcomes?

Such questions challenge the view that life sciences innovations – like GM crops and foods, human embryo research, and DNA forensic testing – are simple or straightforward solutions to complex problems. Instead, they are immersed in intense and enduring controversy. Formidable policy challenges are furthered by their pace of development, which Hindmarsh (2008) has described as “edging towards BioUtopia”.2 In exploring the ways in which different publics have engaged critically with the bioutopian possibilities or promises of the life sciences, contributors also outline reasons for skepticism about the effectiveness of science–society engagement. They identify limitations of strategies that involve publics in “dialogue”, “consultation”, or “partnership”, while recognizing the difficulties of effective science–society engagement. Ideas are also provided about alternative trajectories for life sciences governance that avoid countering bioutopic visions with “democratic utopianism”.

While Europe and North America have been a major focus of attention in analysis of life sciences governance, this collection focuses on Australia and New Zealand. Interestingly, despite their geographic distance from global centers of biodevelopment, and their close proximity to each other, these nation states display divergent policy styles, which provide a useful comparative context. Australia largely follows a technocratic policy and science communication style while increasingly challenged by the emergent Brussels civic policy style (Abels 2005). In contradistinction, New Zealand has adopted a more civic policy style but, like elsewhere, “dialogue” and public participation is difficult to achieve and translate into democratic decision-making. In this context, critiques by Māori (the tangata whenua or indigenous people of New Zealand) have especially pushed state actors and scientists to explore alternatives to established strategies for public engagement (Winstanley et al. 2005, pp. 19–24), and destabilized frameworks for the assessment of risk (Satterfield et al. 2005).

In general, the life sciences confront individuals, communities, and nation states with challenges to taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of life and relationships between living things. Contributors address these challenges through papers on the implications of genetic modification of crops and foods, the use of embryos for stem cell research, emerging knowledge about rare genetic disorders, and developments in forensic DNA databasing and profiling. Global orientations to life sciences governance are juxtaposed with the specificity of Australian and New Zealand case studies.

A key issue in the environmental area is the “reordering of nature” through genetic engineering technologies. The risks posed by this form of “reordering” are the focus of Satterfield and Roberts' analysis of the challenges posed for life sciences governance of Māori assertions in the New Zealand context about the intangible properties of genes and the relational status of human and non-human entities. Satterfield and Roberts explore the ways in which Māori stakeholders have challenged the frameworks for risk assessment used by the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) in New Zealand, set up to authorize the regulation of hazardous substances and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). They explore the ways in which some Māori have resisted being constituted as “governable subjects” and have challenged the legitimacy of decisions based on understandings of risk that do not attend to the ontologies that Māori bring to deliberation about genetic material.

In the human area of the life sciences, bioinnovations present profound challenges to the legal and moral status of embryos, to distinctions between human and non-human, to “normal” reproduction and kinship, to ethics and morals (Gottweis 2002, Waldby 2002), to privacy, autonomy, ownership, identity, and to biosurveillance (Williams and Johnson 2004). These challenges are the focus of papers in this issue, which include reflections by Hindmarsh on issues for citizens arising out of DNA forensic databasing and profiling. These issues include threats to civic liberties involving data security with regard to privacy, unfair discrimination, and extended police powers to take and retain DNA, build ever larger DNA databases and increase their scope, as well as a technocratic approach to policy formation.

Overall, life sciences innovation is highly controversial simply because it relates fundamentally to life and its manipulation and reordering through (co-produced) biophysical and social bodies. Developments in the life sciences that challenge old assumptions about life itself have reconfigured relationships between citizens, scientists, and policymakers and prompted state actors to use new strategies that simultaneously engage publics and limit their input into the formation and application of regulatory regimes. Transformation in the life sciences has also precipitated action by publics directed at asserting their power relative to health professionals, scientists, and policymakers. These discursive shifts in relations between publics, state actors, scientists, technologists, and health and crime professionals have been variously referred to as the politics of life (PAGININI Project n.d.) and the politics of life itself (Rose 2007, p. 3).

The distinction of how these politics of life are being played out in Australia and New Zealand is illustrated by Hindmarsh and Du Plessis who contrast the more technocratic features of the Australian response to the genetic modification of food and fiber with the greater emphasis on civic input in the New Zealand case. In traditional top-down, technocratic, or “demarcation” policy approaches, science and expertise are largely protected from political interference, and accountability falls mainly in the realm of policymakers (Libatore and Funtowicz 2003). As a result, a key characteristic of civic trends in the life sciences is public distrust and social resistance, which have emerged sharply to question the use of certain technologies and also constrain bioinnovation. With respect to food, their bodies, reproduction, energy, and the environment, there is increasing evidence that citizens desire active involvement in life sciences decision-making. Concerned about the social, health, ethical, and environmental implications of a range of emerging biotechnologies, many people want to have a voice in identifying how attention to these implications might shape the use of current developments in the life sciences.

In this growing shift to civic engagement, Cronin offers a narrative of a particular “dialogue” project, initiated by a state agency and documents how it used new strategies to facilitate better communication between individual scientists and specific publics. At a more micro level, Fitzgerald reviews how parents of children with rare genetic conditions constitute themselves as “biological citizens” (Rose and Novas 2005, Rose 2007) relative to doctors and scientists, and argues that location at the periphery of genetic medicine shapes the activism of patient advocacy groups. Her contribution to this issue illustrates the claim that the constitution and operation of “concerned publics” may take different forms in various political economies inside and outside “core” countries (Rose and Novas 2005).

In their review of different trends in levels of civic participation in the regulation of GMOs in Australia and New Zealand, Hindmarsh and Du Plessis explore alternative ways of responding to civic concerns about innovation in the life sciences and map the different trajectories of New Zealand and Australia with respect to institutionalizing civic engagement around issues relating to GM crops and animals. While Australia is characterized by several forms of enduring social resistance, which have not resulted in enhanced civic engagement, New Zealand emerges as a context in which public engagement has been more actively facilitated by the state. However, it is a context that also highlights limitations of these forms of engagement. The authors present an argument for “productive ambivalence” on the part of those advocating the democratization of science and technology decision-making, and identify the need to document and contest “narratives of participation”.

Another key driver pushing current debates about the life sciences is scientific uncertainty about the behaviour of genes, including their relationship with environmental factors. This is pertinent in debates about genetic contamination of agricultural landscapes through gene flow from GM crops, which raises a number of issues, especially cross-pollination of non-GM species (Davies 2004, p. 81). There are also risks of GM crops carrying genes that adversely affect human health through allergenic, toxic, or immunological effects (for example, Malatesta 2002, Prescott et al. 2005). How are citizens to access information about uncertainty in the behaviour of genes and the environmental and health impacts of their modification? In this issue, Salleh, a science and technology analyst and journalist, looks at constraints on journalists' coverage of technological uncertainty and outlines how journalism might better facilitate civic debate about the governance of life sciences innovation.

Controversy about genetically modified food and fiber production is matched by debates arising out of research using embryonic stem cells engendering moral conflicts associated with the destruction of human embryos (for example, Waldby and Mitchell 2006). The legitimacy of state regulation in these fields increasingly depends on demonstrated public involvement in discussion of the social, cultural, and ethical issues posed by life science innovation (Irwin and Wynne 1996). In this issue, Ankeny and Dodds review the characteristics necessary for policy processes to claim some level of deliberative, participatory legitimacy. These characteristics are applied to attempts in Australia to facilitate public input into the development of legislation relating to human embryo research and the formation of ethical guidelines governing new reproductive technologies, clinical practice, and research. Ankeny and Dodds then outline inadequacies in these attempts at public involvement and offer suggestions for new trajectories in civic participation in life science governance. This focus is echoed in the paper by Hindmarsh on forensic DNA technologies, where reference is made to the 2008 Citizen's Inquiry in this area in the UK.

The ways in which state actors may embrace the language of dialogue and public participation as a way of demonstrating “good governance” in the context of controversy about applications of new science has been highlighted by Irwin (2006). He questions whether increasing talk of public dialogue and engagement in Europe is more a matter of “public talk” (that is, talk both by and about the public) than the emergence of new forms of governance. Irwin argues that the current approach is more an “uneasy blend of ‘old’ and ‘new’ assumptions”, which may be a “passing trend before neo-liberal perspectives re-impose themselves or a partial shift in the character of scientific governance towards a more open process of social management and evaluation” (Irwin 2006, p. 318). In this issue, Cronin offers a case study of the ways in which state actors, over several years, redefined what might be entailed in facilitating dialogue about controversial science and technology issues. She draws on textual analysis of policy documents, interviews with state actors and experiments in dialogue interactions between GM scientists and social activists on the GM issue. This illustrates the ways in which potential dialogue about policy directions can be reframed as ways in which scientists might better manage their relationships with specific local publics in the context of public unease about genetic modification and other innovations in the life sciences.

As Cronin's analysis highlights, the contributors to this special issue share with Irwin a critical view of the extent to which public engagement strategies constitute a significant shift in power with respect to science and technology decision-making. Like him, however, they also consider that “public talk” is important, and should be an important focus for investigation, as Hindmarsh and Du Plessis indicate with their concept of “narratives of participation”. In discussing the limitations of current strategies in life sciences governance, and exploring the relationship between these strategies and overlapping and distinct agendas, the focus here is on the constraints on, and possibilities, of citizens' active involvement in defining the terms used to assess what biotechnologies are developed, how they are used, and why and when.

Finally, in analyzing the socio-political aspects of Australasian life sciences governance, the contributors acknowledge the seemingly increasing global and local intersections and interconnections between scientific, technological, economic, ecological, and institutional practices and processes (Rotmans 2005), which appear complex, opaque, and confusing to map (Urry 2000, 2005). With regard to the life sciences, Gottweis (2005, p. 190) has argued: “Governing genomics in the twenty-first century has become a complex challenge that takes place in an unfolding political topography with shifting boundaries … [of] a large number of different actors, top-down and bottom-up strategies and tactics […]”. This political topography includes many newly emergent spaces and forms of governance – which represent a mix of formal legal norms, “soft laws” (Prainsack and Naue 2006), or informal self-regulation through cultural customs, unwritten “ethics codes”, and self-organizing practices, as well as the new deliberative experiments – what we have referred to as a “new civic geography of life sciences governance”.

As social science investigators, perhaps roving cartographers, at the “edge of the world”, the contributors to this collection of Australian and New Zealand papers contribute to the discussion and mapping of emergent and shifting practices in this new civic geography. In the process, they challenge conventional notions of “centre” and “periphery”, “international” and “national”, “global” and “local”, and “top-down” and “bottom-up”, and reflect on future civic trajectories for good governance in the life sciences.

Notes

In referring to “bioelites” Hindmarsh (2008, p. 12) conceptualizes a “biopolitical elite” consisting of a network of corporate industrialists (typically representing life science corporations, technology developers and financiers), scientists (typically representing the biosciences both in the public and private research and development sectors), bureaucrats (typically those in state agencies of science, technology, commerce, trade, agriculture, health, and industry development), and science, technology and legal advisors to business and government. This bioelite are at the forefront of biopolicy networks directed at biotechnological progress.

The phrase “edging towards BioUtopia” refers to the ongoing attempts to progress to and realize a political bioscientific utopia strongly conditioned by genetic engineering. Bioutopia “embraces the golden age narrative, conditioned by scientism and especially the engineering ideal of biology” (Hindmarsh 2008, p. 20).